A liquid fuel, synthesized from water and carbon dioxide by Carbon Engineering
Their research seems almost to smuggle technologies out of the realm of science
fiction and into the real. It suggests that people will soon be able to
produce gasoline and jet fuel from little more than limestone, hydrogen, and air.
what is this witchcraft
But as this carbon dioxide came from the air in the first place, these emissions would not introduce any new CO2 to the atmosphere. Nor would any new oil have to be mined to power your car.
oh yeah, the oil tycoons and all the corrupt officials on their payroll will love this
co2punk looks promising
If it really does what it says it does and actually turns gasoline into a renewable resource while even reversing the harmful effect it's had on the environment, that's a price I'm willing to pay.
Bear in mind I'm incredibly skeptical, though, and I don't get skeptical often but this just sounds too perfect. My gut instinct just on seeing the headline was "oh great, a repeat of the 'clean coal' scam" and even now my brain is screaming that there has to be a catch. If they can pull it off, more power to them, but I can already hear bells ringing of EmDrive 2: Petroleum Boogaloo.
Awful article, the paper cited is about a carbon capture process, it says nothing about turning the captured CO2 into liquid fuels. That step is the main hurdle in achieving true carbon neutrality: reducing CO2 to liquid fuels requires hydrogen, which is obtained by the steam reforming of natural gas.
While it would certainly be expensive it's not quite as ridiculous when you break it down by co2 production versus gdp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
Notably the top three producers are also the top three economies. Together they account for a little over half of our total co2 output. Though this is also operating under the assumption that costs for cleaning wouldn't improve as time goes on and that we'd instantly be scaling to 100% neutralization to begin with.
also big assumption is that carbon capture is run using carbon free sources.
one of the worst problems with carbon capture is that all it takes is a trump turnip to walk on in and shut everything down because 'merica! and a congress that decides not to fund it anymore. there's no private market for carbon captured from the air, either a carbon tax which will almost assuredly be assaulted by the GOP and repealed, or a similar government run pricing scheme would have to be enacted to build a market for something that isn't economical to extract
Well, regardless of how it's done, there needs to be energy put in which will have to come from somewhere. It's not really carbon-neutral if you have to burn coal to turn gaseous CO2 into petroleum. It does mean that we might not completely run out of petroleum at least.
now can we make these small enough to fit in a car and turn it into a(n almost) closed loop system? 🤔
It'd be like a scuba rebreather except for cars. Imagine how much mileage you would get.
Also, who wants to bet these people were quoted out of context by The Atlantic?
“I don’t question that the range of costs they report are valid. I think the lower end of $100 per ton of CO2 produced through their approach is probably doable in five years or so and that their higher end of $250 per [ton of] CO2 is more doable with their technology today,” says Jennifer Wilcox, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines.
“The improvements that Carbon Engineering have made all seem appropriate, and I am comfortable that their estimated costs are within the window of what I would expect from such improvements,” says Roger Aines, a senior scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s energy program.
“The strongest part of this paper, in my opinion, is the fact that they’ve actually tested the technology in a prototype plant for a few years. That’s a big deal, and offers a proof of principle that’s way stronger than simple calculations or computational models,” says Scott Hersey, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Olin College.
The article makes it sound like they support the cost analysis for turning CO2 into liquid fuels, but really all they're commenting on is the cost analysis for CO2 capture. Shame on you, Atlantic.
Sounds just like those miracle solar water condensers to save Africa. If it sounds too good to be true it probably isn't true.
Wouldn't you have to keep pumping oil regardless for the million and one other uses it has? Even then synthesizing any kind of oil is more expensive than just pumping it out of the ground in our current economy or at least in Texas.
So uhh this guy ends up mysteriously dead in a few months? At this point I wouldn't even be surprised tbh.
I'll start caring once this process becomes cheaper and more efficient at producing and storing energy than simply planting trees.
It turns CO2 into snake oil.
Thermodynamics dictate that if you are to capture the CO2 in air and somehow attempt to turn it back into fuel, you must put more energy into the process of transforming it into fuel than would be released via its combustion. Otherwise you'd be breaking basic laws of physics and chemistry.
You'd need a very robust and carbon-neutral energy grid fueled by nuclear, renewables, etc to make this not just be a waste of energy that puts more CO2 into the atmosphere than it takes out, and the only net effect would be to allow people to continue using internal combustion vehicles without placing more carbon into the atmosphere. Good for hobbyists in the long run, I guess.
And if you got a mature and robust power grid based off nuclear and renewables you might as well just use electric vehicles.
It's maybe a good solution for petroleum based lubes that electric cars and industry will still need, but we still have to switch to renewables regardless.
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